Friday, November 6, 2009

I got your letter today, and I would be happy to explain displacement to you! Displacement is actually very simple. Displacement is how far an object ends up from the starting point. Let’s say you are running in a race, which is 300 m long, and the start and finish is at the same point. You get to the end of the race, and you are all excited because you just covered 300 m. Well, you actually had a displacement of 0 m. Since you started and ended at the same point, you really on covered a distance of 0 m. Displacement is defined as a vector quantity that represents the net length of travel, accounting for direction! You might have been getting confused on what the difference is between distance and displacement. In case you are, the distance of an object tells you nothing about the direction of the travel, while displacement tells you precisely how far and in what direction. There are many ways to find the displacement. One way is simply to find the difference of where you started and where you finished (∆X=X2-X1). In a graph, you can find the displacement if you find the area under a velocity (m/s) versus Time (s) graph. If you have any more questions on displacement, feel free to write me back and I would be more than happy to answer your questions!